be understood in terms of historical events, of which the final and most spectacular
was the overthrow of state socialism in Eastern Europe in 1989 followed by its
collapse in the Soviet Union in 1991. In the period dubbed ‘the short twentieth
century’ (Hobsbawm, 1995) – 1914–91 – there have been a series of key events
that arguably presaged the final collapse of the socialist project: the Molotov–
Ribbentrop Pact between the USSR and Nazi Germany in 1939, the Soviet invasions
of Hungary (1956) and Czechoslovakia (1968) and the imposition of martial law
in Poland in the early 1980s. In parallel to these concrete political events there has
been a deeper intellectual crisis. The central problem for Marxists has been the
failure of the working class to develop a truly ‘revolutionary consciousness’. Far
from rising up as one, the working class (or classes?) splintered. In, for example,
Weimar Germany (1919–33) there was a major split between the communists and
the social democrats, as well as between left and right, with a significant section of
the working class attracted to the far right Nazi Party (or NASDP). Also, as critics
of Marx point out, those countries such as Russia that underwent proletarian
revolutions were not the ones ‘marked down’ for it because they lacked sufficient
industrial development. The fragmentation of Marxism into different streams of
thought (McLellan, 1979) was a response to the crisis, but so was the adoption of
Marxist categories of thought by (essentially) non-Marxist theorists. These theorists
use the language of collective agency, oppression and liberation, but they are no
longer applied to the working class, and the strategy of liberation is much more
‘particularistic’ – whereas the root idea of Marxism was that the transition to a
classless society ultimately resulted in the liberation of humankind, and not simply
one oppressed socio-economic class; new social movements, be they feminist,
multiculturalist or ecological, do not necessarilymake such a claim. We say ‘not
necessarily’ because there is still a hint that women’s liberation is good for men, or
that human beings are part of nature and so ecological justice is also human justice.
Fundamentalism – or, at least, Islamic fundamentalism – can also be understood as
a response to the crisis of Marxism: many parts of the Arab-Islamic world embraced
Marxist ideology in the 1960s as a form of development, or catch-up, ideology.
The failure of state-led socialism opened a space for another ostensibly egalitarian
ideology – Islamic fundamentalism.
We have suggested that the four new ideologies are, in part, a response to the
failure of Marxism, but conversely at least two of them – feminism and ecologism
- have emerged due to rising levels of economic well-being (of course the survival
of capitalism, against Marx’s predictions, is part of the explanation of the crisis of
Marxism). This may seem a strange claim, given that both are concerned with
oppression. However, that feminism and ecologism emerged in the 1960s is
significant. If we consider gender relations, even prior to the 1960s there were social
changes taking place that fundamentally affected the balance of power between men
and women: the wartime mobilisation of women to work in factories and on the
land is generally regarded as significant in breaking down the distinction between
the private (home) and the public (work and the civic sphere). The development of
household appliances and a general improvement in living conditions reduced to
some extent the pressure on women as the chief source of domestic labour. By the
1960s the speed of change had picked up, with Western industrialised countries
experiencing significant economic and social changes: a shift from manufacturing
(blue-collar) jobs to service (white-collar) jobs; greater availability of contraception,
What is a new social movement? 307